The Emergence of the Modern State

Abstract

Seventeenth-century political theorists were addressing the inhabitants of a continent where the unity symbolized by the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire had vanished, where the myth of a universal Christendom had been replaced by separate and sovereign states whose claims to power were derived from inside the political community, not from an external and transnational authority. These emerging states increasingly wielded their territorial power with a monopoly over the use of physical coercion and with a moral authority separate from either divine sanction on the one hand, or mere brute force on the other. And by the end of the century, these same sovereign states would anchor their existence not in the person of an individual ruler or rulers, but in a set of institutional structures whose public power continued even as individual magistrates passed from the scene. By 1700 neither the people nor the prince defined states which had become impersonal and theoretical entities, higher communities whose existence transcended the imprint of individuals and even status groups.¹ By 1700 sovereignty inhered not in the prince, as had been the case at the opening of the century, nor in the popular will, as evidenced in some countries towards the end of the century, but in a particular order of continuous public authority, a final and absolute judicial entity divorced from the flesh and allied to the realm of abstraction.